Gethsemane Hall

by David Annandale

  The footing was treacherous. The steps were uneven, barely hewn from the stone. The rise of each step was different from the last, but all were high. Edges caught at Meacham’s shoes, convex surfaces became concave with no warning. The walls were very close. There was nowhere to fall but straight ahead, onto stone that would smash bone with the bluntness of clubs and the tearing of flint knives. There was no curve to the descent, no slipknot twist like the stairs down from the crypt. This was a straight diagonal. Meacham sorted out her bearings. They were heading, she thought, to a point that would bring them beneath the ectoplasm lake. The stairs ended at last in a short, level corridor. Meacham looked back up and couldn’t see the top of the steps. She wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t been able to see the bottom from the other end. So no, she wasn’t surprised. She wasn’t happy either.

  Gray had walked forward a few steps and was reaching up to touch something on the wall. “What is it?” Meacham asked and caught up. It was a sconce, its iron deeply rusted.

  “Should have brought torches,” Gray said.

  “I’m cold,” Pertwee complained. No one answered, but she was right, Meacham thought. It was cold. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees as they’d come down. The ectoplasm raced ahead, disappeared.

  They moved on again, and the corridor dead-ended in a vast room. They shone their lights around. They took it all in. Gray didn’t say anything. Neither did Meacham or Sturghill. Hudson breathed, “Oh, no.” Pertwee began to cry.

  The cave was almost as big as the one where Crawford had died. It was just as artificial as the rest of the network, but it still seemed out of place. The other tunnels and rooms had the shapes dictated by the contingencies of mining. There was no real planning, and the system felt natural. Here there was stonework on the walls. The stairs leading here were slap-dash efforts, but the room had had time, money, and attention. With its ribbed vault, it was a close sibling to the crypt, its fraternal if not its identical twin. And much, much larger. Plenty of room to strut its stuff. Tapestries hung along the walls. They were a series. Meacham could see a progression to them, but she couldn’t tell what was the beginning of the narrative, what was the end. Each tapestry spilled into the other in an Escher loop, the story growing worse with each spiral.

  “Christ, Louise,” Sturghill said. “You were right.” She wasn’t joking. Her voice cracked.

  They’d found Hell. The tapestries were the arc of pain. They were faded, dank with humidity and time, muddy pinks and tarnished yellows. The souls of the damned were being tortured, broken, sundered. The screams of agony were frozen in medieval formality, flattened by the lack of perspective but as credible as photographs. They weren’t being tortured by other human beings. As initial visceral recoil faded, Meacham frowned, puzzled by the iconography. She was as far out of her field as it was possible to be, but things still struck her as wrong. There were plenty of Christian images here. Christ showed up on the cross several times. But the crucifixion didn’t come across as tragedy, as hope for redemption, as supreme act of love. And Christ was being hurt by more than nails, thorns, and spear. He was being twisted and shredded by the same teeth and claws as the other souls. He was no better off. If anything, the pain on his face was a despair that passed all understanding. His eyes were wide with terrible epiphany. The tapestry tore into him with enormous stylistic glee. There was fun to be had. Meacham frowned. The vibe was all wrong.

  The teeth. The claws. More problems. If Meacham were looking at Hell, she should be seeing demons, she thought. There was monstrosity here, but not the right kind. Meacham looked for any trace of the old clichés: the horns, the hooves, the pitchforks, the wings. Nothing. She wasn’t even sure if what was inflicting the pain was a single being or several. There were teeth, there were claws, there were scales. There was immensity. Meacham had the sense of fragments, of desperate representations pointing to something too huge to be contained by art. The sweep of the tapestries was a picture of sadistic, reptilian triumph. The hands that had crafted this work were humbled and exhilarated by the scale of what they were having to convey.

  Meacham turned to Hudson. He was moving from one tapestry to the next, staring at the little details of torture, backing up to take in the whole blow, then circling round again. Meacham thought he should stop. She could feel the intensity of the narrative ramp up every time she turned around, and she didn’t have a faith that was being assaulted. “Patrick,” she called, trying to break the trance. He jumped, shook himself and joined her. His eyes were squinting from the pain. Meacham said, “I don’t understand these. Have you ever seen anything like them?”

  “No.” He glanced at the tapestries, then away, as if they had stared back. “They aren’t Christian by any measure I know of.”

  “What about the crucifixion imagery?”

  “That’s part of what I mean.” He looked terrified. “This isn’t even a repudiation.”

  “The triumph of the devil?”

  “I don’t think so. If there’s a victor, there’s a war. I don’t see any sign of there having even been a contest here, do you?”

  No, she didn’t.

  The rest of the room was, Meacham thought, what made Pertwee weep, even more than the tapestries. The metal on the machines was rusted, the leather rotted, but they still looked potent. Rack. Maiden. Wheel. Executioner’s block. Heaped blades and hooks. Decomposed but still barbed whips. Dark stains on the stone floor, on stone blocks, on metal edges. On the other side of the cavern from the entrance, a metal throne sat on a rectangular dais. The ironwork of the chair was writhing muscle. It was sharp. If Meacham sat in it, she would bleed. There were manacles on the side. Pertwee had taken a few steps toward the chair but was standing still now, shivering. “There,” she said. “It happened there. They killed her there.”

  They gathered beside Pertwee. The temperature plummeted. Meacham edged a bit closer to the chair. The cold bit into her face.

  “They tied Saint Rose to that chair and tortured her to death,” Pertwee whispered. She was creating a new mantra.

  “No, they didn’t,” Sturghill said. She sounded definite.

  “What?” And Pertwee sounded offended.

  “Trust me, I’m a magician. I know from devices. Look at the placement of the manacles.”

  “I don’t see it,” Meacham said.

  “Watch.” Sturghill moved to the chair. She jumped just before reaching it. “God damn that is cold.” She hugged herself for warmth and sat down, very carefully. Her teeth chattered. She shifted with discomfort, as if sitting on a bed of nails. “This is vicious sharp,” she muttered.

  “Of course it is,” Pertwee said. “No one would sit there unless they were forced to.”

  “Or they were seriously fucked in the head,” Sturghill countered. “Go on. Use the manacles. Chain me down here.”

  Meacham got it. The chains were too short, the clasps at the base and side of the chair. There was no way anyone sitting there could be held. “People were held next to the person sitting there,” she said.

  “Exactly.” Sturghill stood up. “This is a throne.” She danced away from the chair. “It’s also bloody absolute zero right there.”

  Meacham walked over to the dais. The cold became more and more intense as she approached. When she reached the dais, the temperature turned into a scalpel. It sliced flesh and nicked bone. Meacham winced and forced herself to stand on the platform. She looked out at the cavern. From this position, every instrument in the space was visible. Fine perspective. Best seat in the house. She had a vision of the possessor of the chair, roaring joy and hatred at sadistic spectacle and masochistic pain. And who, do you think, would be sitting here? she wondered. She examined the back of the chair. “Check this out,” she said. It was hard to speak. Her lips were numb. The others approached, shivering. There was an emblem in the iron. It was a black rose. Its petals were blades. Its stem was python twist of thorns. “What do you think of your saint now?” Meacham said to Pertwee.
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br />   Pertwee shook her head and backed away from the chair. They all did. The cold was too intense. But as she stepped away, Meacham’s eyes dropped to the dais. There was another rose, in the same design, carved into the stone in bas-relief. She held back against the cold, hanging on for answers. The dais, she now saw, was not square. It was rectangular. If it hadn’t been for the chair, she would have recognized the shape of the marble slab immediately. “Here,” she said. “She’s buried here. This is her tomb.”

  “That makes no sense,” Pertwee said. There was a flash of hope in her objection, as if the logical problem might restore Rose to sainthood. “How could she have a throne on top of her own grave?”

  Meacham was wondering the same thing. She was still on her hands and knees. She ran her flashlight and her fingers along the base of the slab. It was like touching dry ice. Her fingers burned. It was hard to feel anything other than the pain. She saw the indentation as she touched it. “There’s a mechanism here, like the other one.” The edges she touched felt jumbled, chaotic. She pulled her fingers away, peered at the tiny recess in the stone. “It’s been smashed,” she said. She could withdraw from the cold spot, now. She felt frostbite in her cheeks and the tip of her nose. But she stayed where she was, as if the ordeal granted her authority, her words the weight of truth.

  “Meaning what?” Pertwee asked, stubborn.

  “Meaning she had her tomb constructed before she died,” Gray answered. “Meaning that she sat on her own grave as she watched others tortured and killed.”

  “I won’t believe it,” Pertwee pleaded.

  “She’s here,” Meacham said and slapped the top of the marble.

  Even through the deadening cold, she felt the vibration through her fingertips. She looked down at the grave. The vibration became a rumble. She threw herself backwards as the ectoplasm erupted from the centre of the rose emblem. It geysered up, hit the roof of the cavern, followed the curve of the vault. It flowed into the keystone. Meacham scrambled back, staring at the black flow. Here was the source. Here was what fed the lake that was directly above them now.

  Hudson had his back against the wall. “Why?” he kept repeating. He finally choked out a sentence. “Why did it play possum?” Then another: “Why now?”

  “To prove you wrong,” Gray answered.

  “To show I’m right,” Meacham said, at the same moment. She spoke more quietly than Gray. His response had a sharp edge of triumph. The problem was, she thought he was correct. Hudson’s faith had been teased in order to lure them all here. That thought led her to another why? There was sentience here, not mindless energy. It was playing a game. It had an agenda. Rose had not stopped her wanting with death.

  “Can we leave?” Sturghill asked, eyes wide and breath short and fast. “Like now?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She ran from the cavern. Meacham tore her eyes away from the pulsing stream of black. She began to run, too, conscious suddenly not of questions but of Crawford and of Corderman, and what the strength she saw could do to her. She was on the heels of Pertwee and Hudson. As she reached the staircase back up, she became aware of an absence at her back, and she looked over her shoulder. She had expected to see Gray right behind her. He wasn’t. He was coming, but slowly, walking down the tunnel reluctantly, giving the cavern and its torture and the ectoplasm pillar-of-salt looks. He was mesmerized. Meacham ran back. “Come on,” she said and dragged him by the collar. He resisted at first, then seemed to shake himself awake and fell into step.

  Up the staircase, the ascent more difficult and treacherous than the descent, each stone ledge finding its own uneven way of trying to make her fall and smash her face open. She stayed on her feet, made it out of the false tomb. And then they were still underground, deep underground, and there was more running through the rocky darkness, still the snake curl to navigate, still the black lake to run past, and it was choppy now, restless, vexed to nightmare, though it did not reach out for her. And after that, there was the spiral up to the crypt. And then at last they were on the ground floor of Gethsemane Hall, and there was air and space, but there was very little light, because time had slipped by and withered while they were in the caves, and night had come again, closing its stone roof over them once more.

  They didn’t regroup in the Great Hall. They stood in the courtyard. Gray stayed in the doorway to the outer hall, as if reluctant to step outside the house, away from what was his. Sturghill was eyeing the gatehouse tower. “Do you think we can still leave?” she asked Meacham. She looked as if she were expecting a portcullis to slam down, keeping them in for good and for all.

  “Do you think we should?” Meacham countered. They’d accomplished nothing so far.

  “You say that like we have a chance,” said Sturghill.

  Hudson looked broken. He took a half step in three different directions, seeking flight or faith, then rounded on Gray. “So?” he asked. “Are you happy now? Do you have your truth?”

  “Getting there.”

  Avoiding Sturghill’s contagious despair, Meacham asked Gray, “Why do you care so much about the truth?”

  Gray said simply, “What’s left?”

  Point taken. All her old assumptions were smoking ruins. Comfortable beliefs and disbeliefs were having their bones picked over by the Hall and its tenant. She wasn’t satisfied, though. “Is that it?” she asked. “You’ll lie down and die as long as you understand why?”

  “I’m not dead yet,” said Gray. “Neither are you.”

  Smack upside the head. He was right. And though it raised a whole new batch of questions, there was her answer for Sturghill. “Kristine,” she said. “Think about it. Why aren’t we dead yet? Given what we know this thing can do, why hasn’t it killed us?”

  “Because it hasn’t felt like it yet.”

  Too facile. Even under the new nightmare rules, the possibility didn’t feel right. “So what’s it doing in the meantime? Channel surfing? Does this thing strike you as the sort to be dangerous only periodically?”

  “No,” Sturghill said, sounding a bit more interested. Hudson and Pertwee were moving closer, moths to the candle flame of hope.

  “It has a name,” Gray said.

  “No,” Pertwee protested, but by rote, weakly.

  “Yes,” Meacham agreed. “Rose. Think about that setup down below. That wasn’t a Sunday afternoon hobby, what she had going on down there.”

  “Her hatred must have been huge,” Hudson said.

  “So why would she let us off the hook?”

  “That can’t be Saint Rose,” Pertwee whispered.

  Meacham ignored her. “Unless she doesn’t have a choice,” she continued.

  “Doesn’t seem that weak to me,” said Sturghill.

  “I can still run pretty fast if I have to,” Meacham pointed out. “I’ve been known to shift some heavy weights now and then. But not all the time. I get tired.”

  “The tide ebbs and flows,” Gray said. He hadn’t budged from the doorway.

  “She isn’t strong enough to hurt us all the time,” Meacham concluded.

  Hudson was engaged, but his hope was provisional. “She’s growing stronger, though. People weren’t dying here before.”

  “She’s feeding, or being fed, somehow.”

  Sturghill said, “That’s cool and all. But how does this help us? We still have no idea how to avoid being killed when she’s strong enough, and never mind hurting her back.”

  Meacham drew a blank. She looked at Gray. He smiled, shrugged, no more concerned than if they’d been discussing Coronation Street plot points. “She did retreat when you prayed,” she said to Hudson, grasping for anything at all.

  “You mean she pretended to and lured us to her torture chamber,” he replied, not about to mount the breach a second time.

  Another point worth thinking about. “Fair enough, but why? Why did she want us to see that?”

  “Stop saying she!” Pertwee exploded. “This isn’t Saint Rose. It can’t be.”

  Mea
cham was about to ignore her, plunge on again. Nothing to be done in the face of such desperate belief. But Gray spoke first. “Why not?” he asked. He didn’t sound dismissive.

  “Because of what we know about her.”

  “The truth, you mean.”

  “Yes!” She was close to sobbing again.

  “And what is that?” Gray’s tone was still gentle, but to Meacham’s ears, the probing was no less relentless.

  “Her name just about says it all.” Pertwee was regaining her composure as she moved into explanatory mode. “Saint Rose the Evangelist. She was a daughter of nobility. She was deeply committed to the dissemination of Christianity.”

  “To broadcasting the truth,” Gray offered.

  “If you like, yes. Spiritual truth as she understood it, anyway. She was revered for —”

  Gray interrupted. “But she’s also known for being something of a hermit, isn’t she?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Isn’t that a bit contradictory?”

  “Richard,” Hudson began. Meacham sensed a logic trap being drawn around Pertwee. But there was still nothing savage in the way Gray spoke, or in his eyes.

  “No,” Pertwee answered. “She did retreat from the world, but she invited the world to come here, to listen to her teaching, to heal. You should know all this.”

  Gray smiled. “The old family truths.”

  Meacham was startled. “You’re a descendant?”

  “Of her brother’s. She didn’t have children. The story has it that her brother and his wife were just as devoted to her ministry.”

  “It’s more than a story,” said Pertwee.

  “But what is her reputation based on?” Gray asked.

  “What are you talking about? Her teachings, her works, her —”

  “Which are recorded where?”

  “In everything that has ever been written about her.”

  “Including the works of her contemporaries?”